Poem Of The Week: To Lucasta, Going To The Wars By Richard Lovelace (1617-1657)

The seventeenth century poet, Richard Lovelace, speaks to a vanished courtly age. Written, probably in 1640, prior to the poet’s participation in the Bishops Wars, a series of religious confrontations that were a precursor to the English Civil War, ‘To Lucasta’ is a formally constructed poem of love and of honour.

The titular ‘Lucasta’ is thought to be Lucy Sacheverell, Lovelace’s muse, and the poet’s manifest ardency is a clear indication of a fervour untempered by experience, but fired by a surplus of moral rectitude. Lovelace’s argument, concisely worked over three rhyming quatrains, subordinates the idea of Love to the ideal of Honour: the poet/soldier’s sense of purpose skilfully vindicates his own commitment to a cause as the primary condition of an ardour whose intensity could not sustain without it.

The studied self-effacement of Lovelace’s ‘unchaste’ seeking of the ‘mistress’ of war, with its clamour of sword, horse and shield, stands in deliberate contrast to the quiet asceticism of his inamorata’s chastity. And if we, in a more cynical age, are inclined to express doubt as to dubiety of motive, then perhaps, with Larkin, we should take the long view : ‘What will survive of us is love’* … in spite of the questionable fidelity of appearance.

‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars’ is taken from The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950 published by the Oxford University Press (1972).